ESCAPE EXPERIENCE IN LITERARY REPORTAGE

Abstract

The issue of resettlement from a country where war is ongoing does not cease to be timely even in the 21’st century. Millions of people who are forced to leave their homes go through the painful experience of escape, often without even knowing their destination. The article examines the ways of artistic representation of the escape experience in Khader Alagha’s Germanlanguage literary reportage “Exil – ein Leben auf Zeit”, which is included in the collection “Ankunft: Literarische Reportagen geflüchteter Autorinnen und Autoren”. The research carried out at the thematic, figurative and linguisticnarrative levels established that the motive of escape is pervasive in the text selected for analysis and is traced in a number of concepts, namely: emigration against one’s own will; feelings of guilt towards relatives and friends who remained in areas where hostilities are taking place; the problem of division, insecurity, inferiority due to living in a foreign country. It is observed that the image of the refugee artist appears problematic in the text, which causes the narrator’s internal conflict. Being divided between two worlds, he strives to be useful to his country through the verbal mediation of its experience to the European reader, but «escape into words», which is also considered as a construct of the experience of escape, is difficult. The author strengthens the transmission of leading motives with the help of linguistic and stylistic means (epithets, metaphors, repetition, binary oppositions). The chosen type of narration is also important, which involves the narration of a homodiegetic narrator in an extradiegetic situation from the first person plural, which allows the narrator to demonstrate his identification with his native people even when he is in a foreign land. The opinion that a well-chosen form of literary reportage, a hybrid genre on the border of literature and journalism, made it possible for the author to create a channel between the Syrian people and Europe is substantiated. The purpose of such a connection is not only to show the German-speaking reader one of the aspects of the life of the refugees, but also to justify the importance of efforts aimed at ending the war and overcoming the terrorist regime.